Ibrahim Edhem Pasha

Ibrahim Edhem Pasha (born on Chios in 1818 or 1819 – died at Istanbul in March 1893) was an Ottoman statesman of Greek origin who held the grand vizierate from 5 February 1877 to 11 January 1878, at the opening of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign. ^{1 2} Raised in the household of Grand Vizier Hüsrev Pasha and trained at the École des Mines in Paris, he became the first Turkish mining engineer in the modern sense, and was the father of Osman Hamdi Bey, founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. ¹

Edhem was born in a Christian Greek Orthodox village on Chios to Greek parents, and was orphaned in the Chios massacre of 1822; sold into slavery, he was brought to Constantinople and adopted by the grand vizier Hüsrev Pasha, who raised about ten orphaned or purchased children, many of whom rose to high office. ¹ Sent to Paris under state scholarship under his foster father's and Sultan Mahmud II's supervision, he graduated among the top pupils of the École des Mines and was a classmate and friend of Louis Pasteur. ^{1 2}

His first high office was the foreign ministry (November 1856 – April 1857); ministries of commerce, public works and education, the governorships of Tırhala and Yanya, the Berlin embassy (1876), the presidency of the Council of State and the Ottoman delegation to the Constantinople Conference (1876–1877) followed. ^{1 2} On 5 February 1877 Abdul Hamid II dismissed Midhat Pasha and made Edhem grand vizier; he led the government through the first months of the Russo-Turkish War until his dismissal on 11 January 1878, after the fall of Plevna. ² He was then ambassador to Vienna (1879–1882) and Minister of the Interior (1883–1885), and died at Istanbul in 1893. ¹

As the first Turkish mining engineer in the modern sense he introduced modern mining engineering to the empire after graduating from the Paris School of Mines. ¹ His family's legacy ran through his sons: Osman Hamdi Bey founded the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, İsmail Galib Bey founded numismatics as a scientific discipline in Turkey, and Halil Edhem Eldem succeeded his brother at the museum. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum.

The historian Edhem Eldem notes that Edhem Pasha himself tried to efface his Greek connections: his son Osman Hamdi claimed descent from the Skaramanga family, other scholars have proposed other Chiot families, and his precise ancestry remains uncertain. ¹

On his faith — the most delicate question in this record: the English article's text, citing Wendy Shaw, attests a Greek Orthodox birth and an upbringing in a Muslim grandee's household — origins and upbringing, which under the lane rules never count as the man's own attested affiliation. ¹ Its categories file him under "Converts to Sunni Islam from Eastern Orthodoxy", but no article's text discusses his personal religion; the Turkish infobox religion field is empty and its categories call him only an ethnic Greek Muslim, the Arabic infobox gives Islam generically, and Wikidata gives only generic Islam. ^{2 3 4} The school "Sunni" is thus named only inside one Wikipedia family, so under the two-source rule and the doubt rule his faith is recorded as unknown, with all the readings preserved in the record's faith note. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.